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JUST AS I PROMISED PHOENIX I would, I teleported to the minion village with her to go to the house that she lived in with her three older brothers.
Calvin, Zavian, and Dante were all in the kitchen, chatting while Calvin made lunch when they heard us come in. Dante was the first to notice and he pranced up, moving behind Phoenix to pick her up and spin her around. That was what he usually did to greet her, though Phoenix didn’t necessarily always appreciate it.
The Bauer siblings had always been a tight-knit group, and they couldn’t deny each other even if they wanted to. It was obvious even in their appearances that they were at least related in some way.
Calvin was the eldest of the four and was twelve years older than Phoenix and I. He was tall and lanky with mouse-brown hair that he never put too much effort into keeping neat or particularly short. He was the only one of the three brothers that had brown eyes and was also the only one with a beard that, again, he didn’t seem to be too bothered with trying to keep up with. He, like his two brothers, had glasses, but he was the only one of them that had to wear them all of the time. Zavian and Dante really only had to have glasses when they were reading and Dante didn’t usually bother to wear them even then.
Dante was the youngest of the brothers and was just around four years older than me and Phoenix. He took a lot better care of himself than Calvin ever did and spent the most amount of time at the gym and researching anything he could about fitness. If he wasn’t so busy with the Head Council, there was a good chance that he would’ve had his own gym and worked as a personal trainer. He had longer brown hair that he kept in a bun most of the time and had a few tattoos, though probably not as many as he personally wanted considering Calvin definitely cared very deeply about the way that all three of his siblings presented themselves.
Calvin meant well by it for the most part - he just didn’t want his siblings to ever look back and regret something that they did - but I knew that Phoenix in particular was often agitated by his opinions on the way his siblings chose to look.
Zavian, the second oldest (and eight years older than Phoenix and I), was almost a perfect mix between Calvin and Dante. He used to work as a model, so he tended to always be worried about the impression that he gave off to other people (and not just in regards to his appearance), but fortunately for him, he never had to try very hard to be handsome. He had dark eyes, tan skin, and dark hair that was always kept as neat as possible. He never put too much work in his appearance - usually just rolling out of bed and going on with the day. Frankly, Zavian was the most infuriating of the Bauer brothers in that aspect alone.
Phoenix was the most different in appearance out of the four. I always thought it was potentially because she was their half-sister (they all had the same mother, but Phoenix had a different father than the one that the three brothers did), but then I saw all four of them together and the differences became more obvious and less easy to explain away.
Phoenix was often described as being wolfish in appearance. Like Zavian, she had tan skin and distinct facial features (including cheekbones that Athena was known for being jealous of and a slightly hooked nose that I always knew Phoenix hated). She was significantly taller than her three brothers and was much more lean than them, though she by far had the most ferocious appetite.
Her long, black hair cascaded down to the middle of her back (mostly because she hated haircuts and only got them when she was forced to by Calvin), and never took to dyeing very well no matter how many times she tried. There were still some remnants of teal on the tips of her hair from her last attempt, but they were quickly fading. Phoenix had deep brown eyes that anyone and everyone could easily get lost in, especially when she was staring at them for any amount of time.
I loved Phoenix dearly, but there was really only one way to describe her and that was the word “intimidating”. If she wasn’t my best friend, I probably would’ve been more scared of her, but I also knew most of what she survived through under her mother’s roof back in Germany, so I wasn’t not afraid of her either.
Phoenix watched as Dante finally put her down and returned to the kitchen island where he sat back down next to Zavian, saving the two barstools next to him for Phoenix and I. I followed Phoenix over, watching Calvin as he was still busy at work in the kitchen cooking up something that was undoubtedly going to be delicious.
“You two are just in time for lunch,” Calvin hummed, “How’s Prince Griffin?”
“About the same,” Phoenix sighed, “He was in a lot more pain this morning than he was last night, but the doc is still hopeful to discharge him either tomorrow or Sunday.”
Calvin nodded, “That makes sense - if he’s not in danger of dying, there isn’t much else that the hospital can do for him. It’s not like they can give him anything to help that pain.”
Phoenix twirled a strand of hair around her finger as she brought her knees up to her chest. “Any updates on that Freddie guy and his case?” She asked.
Calvin shook his head, “No, but I think we should probably bump up his hearing on the agenda. He might have some information about the war that could be useful to us pretty soon here.”
Phoenix nodded slowly and got up to go around to the other side of the island and help her brother with lunch.
“What did he do, anyway?” Dante asked, “I don’t think I ever got that part.”
“He was allegedly caught feeding important pieces of information about us to Ga- sorry, Eddie - the Big Man Upstairs and his archangels. It’s said that he had a buddy from His side that was killed and so he wanted revenge on King Victor,” Calvin explained, “It’s a much longer story than that, but that’s the gist of it.”
I sat in silence, listening to the Bauer siblings talk amongst themselves. I often completely forgot that the Bauers made up the Head Council, though that was probably just because I knew all four of them personally and I often forgot that they were anything more than close friends of mine and Victor’s. That didn’t make the work that they did any less important, though. Actually, they played a massive role in the politics of Hell.
The original premise of the Head Council was proposed around thirteen years ago - about a week or so after the Bauer siblings moved from their childhood home in Germany to Las Vegas in search of a change of scenery as well as more safety than they ever could have gotten if they stayed where they were. Their mother, Evelyn Bauer, had just killed herself following the decision that granted Calvin full custody of all three of his siblings.
Once in Las Vegas, Calvin began attending law school. Victor met Calvin one day and was so moved by the Bauers’ survival story that the two continued to interact until Victor finally decided that Calvin was who he was looking for to be the first member of the Head Council.
Not wanting anything to do with deciding what punishments were dealt to his subjects, Victor had been looking for someone patient and fair enough to take over that role for him for years. Calvin was, apparently, the perfect fit and so it was decided.
Calvin would join the Head Council first and in the future, if they chose to do so, his siblings would attend law school and later join him on the Council.
Zavian did after he decided that he was done with his modelling career and Dante followed close behind Zavian, never doing much without Zavian doing it first or straying away from the precedence that his older brothers set.
Being the youngest of the four (and also having been inducted in just a few months ago), Phoenix was the newest member of the Head Council, but she never wanted anything else. She’d graduated from highschool two years early (Athena and I still weren’t sure how she did that) and started attending law school directly following that.
I supposed Phoenix was something to admire in that regard. She always had an idea of what she was going to do in her life and she always seemed to be so confident in that knowledge, too. I supposed that, despite everything that she had been put through by her mother, she had had enough willpower to get through it and do just about anything she wanted. She never seemed to have much problem with accepting who she was either.
I’d always thought that, but little did I realize then that I would later find out that all of that was nothing but a facade. At the end of the day, people only got to see what others wanted them to see.